When love was a question, the message arrived
in the beak of a wire and plaster bird. The coloratura
was hardly to be believed. For flight,
it took three stagehands: two
on the pulleys and one on the flute. And you
thought fancy rained like grace.
Our fog machine lost in the Parcel Post, we improvised
with smoke. The heroine dies of tuberculosis after all.
Remorse and the raw night air: any plausible tenor
It had almost nothing to do with sex.
The boy
in his corset and farthingale, his head-
voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin
was not
and never had been simply in our pay. Or
was it some lost logic the regional accent
restores?
A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant
If faith is a tree that sorrow grows
and women, repentant or not, are swamps,
a man who comes for solace here
will be up to his knees and slow
getting out. A name can turn on anyone.
But say that a woman washes the dust
from a stranger’ s feet
and sits quite dry-eyed in front
of her mirror at night.
The candle flame moves with her breath, as does
Dear one, the sea smells of nostalgia. We’ re beached and bloated, lie
on shell sand, oil rigs nowhere seen. It’ s Long Island, and the weather
is fine. What to disturb in the heart of a man?
A boy is not a body. A boy is a walk.
Shed the machine.
Must be entirely flesh to fight.
Must be strategy instead of filling.
Against the backdark, bright
riband flickers of heat lightning. Nearer
hills begin to show, to come clear
as a hard, detached
and glimmering brim
I’ ll know the time to leave the room
where I’ ve been growing hair
from my face, drinking dark beers
when the light in the lake bums out.
That’ s when fish
turn on their music.
They lie in a blue current
waiting for the moon
to pass over, and the fishermen
with their lanterns know this
as they spill a can of sweet corn
and wonder if they spoke
This high up, the face
eroding; the red cedar slopes
over. An accident chooses a stranger.
Each rain unplugs roots
which thin out like a hand.
Above the river, heat
lightning flicks silently
and the sound holds, coiled in air.
Some nights you are here
dangling a Valpolicella bottle,
staring down at the flat water
that slides by with its mouth full of starlight.
It is always quiet
Use a new conductor every time-out
you have sextet — before foreshore,
before pen name gets anywhere
near any bogey opera glass
(to avoid expulsion to any bogey
flunkey that can carry infidel)
Handle conductor gently
Put conductor on as soon as
pen name is hard
be sure rolled-up ringworm is on
the outspokenness. And leave
space suit at tire to hold
semi-final when you come
why am i doing this? Failure
to keep my work in order so as
to be able to find things
to paint the house
to earn enough money to live on
to reorganize the house so as
to be able to paint the house &
to be able to find things and
earn enough money so as
to be able to put books together
to publish works and books
to have time
to answer mail & phone calls
to wash the windows
to make the kitchen better to work in
to have the money to buy a simple radio
Where the western zun, unclouded,
Up above the grey hill-tops,
Did sheen drough ashes, lofty sh’ ouded,
On the turf beside the copse,
In zummer weather,
We together,
Sorrow-slightèn, work-vorgettèn,
Gambol’ d wi’ the zun a-zettèn.
